Photos: Oscar Muhammad
HARVEY, Ill. (FinalCall.com) – What is wrong with the Black community? This is the question that Minister Ava Muhammad contended with during her invigorating keynote lecture May 13 of the Mother’s Day Luncheon hosted by the Southsuburban Study Group here.
“It is disintegrating, sinking, because it lacks the union of the masculine and the feminine in our quest for oneness of God,” she answered, a union that is reflected in the male and female variations of the Divine Attributes of Allah. “You have an ‘Ali’ and you have an ‘Aaliyah.’ This indicates that the primal ideas in the mind of God are not just male,” she told the gathering of over 200 people, adding that, “We cannot ignore our need for union and think that we are going to attain oneness with God.”
Min. Ava, a national spokesperson for the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, is also a practicing attorney and author. The married mother of two drove with her family 12 hours from their home in Atlanta to accept the invitation from Minister Karriem Muhammad to address the luncheon, and satisfy, as he said, “a hunger to hear” her.
Acknowledging the hard work of the Believers in the study group, in particular key organizer Diana Muhammad, Min. Karriem urged everyone present to reconnect with their mothers. “We are here to help Minister Farrakhan build this nation, a nation of God-fearing men and women,” he said. “We are here for the mothers in the room but also for the mothers that are lost, the mothers in the street, the mothers who do not know their own selves and their families.”
In his introduction of Min. Ava, Min. Karriem played the tape of words of introduction by Minister Farrakhan when he installed her as the Southern Regional Minister based in Muhammad’s Mosque No. 15 in Atlanta, making history as the first female to head a mosque in the entire Muslim world.
“When I met her she was a prosecutor, then she became a defense attorney. She was fighting cancer but overcame that,” Minister Farrakhan’s words echoed through the speakers. “She is a Sister that knows more of my teaching than more of the men. Ava is different from the men. Ava was humble. Ava has been one of my best students since I have been teaching. As a student of the Word, she is not ashamed to say Minister Farrakhan dictated this to me.”
This was evident throughout her lecture, which centered on the principles of union in marriage as noted in Biblical scripture when Jesus said a man shall leave the house of his mother and father to cleave unto his wife and shall become one flesh. Min. Ava explained that this principle of separation first, recreation second, can be taken on the level of nation-building, and quoted the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as saying, “It is more important to teach our people separation than prayer.”
In her prognosis of our communities, she outlined several factors of the death pervasive in our homes and families such as a “catastrophic breakdown of communication and complete disconnect with our purpose for living,” the lack of constant neighborly supervision and principled parental examples, random pregnancies, child abandonment and unhappy families resulting from poor decisions of sexual partners.
“We need a mature and scientific approach to successfully produce a man and woman who reflect God,” Min. Ava advised. “The harmonious blending of the male and female energy is essential to all life. This is absent in our community and that is why our community is dead. The women are in one corner and the men are in another corner and we are enemies of each other, while the children of our slave-masters are profiting from our enmity.”
Min. Ava argued that our desire to assimilate and comfort in only listening to lectures, but not manifesting the practice in our lives, are detrimental to our development as a separate nation. “It is our level of comfort and ease that is making us condemn our children to extinction. We are surrounded by rebellion to God’s way in our communities, which affects our children, who press us for allowances or to go to proms with spaghetti-strapped dresses,” she observed, further stressing the fact that we must separate socially, mentally and morally.
“We can build all the mosques and churches, but until we create environments where we live in harmony with the community we wish to see, we will continue to disintegrate until we disappear.”
Stressing the need for planned residential communities, she pointed out the Mormons in Salt Lake City and the Amish in Pennsylvania, where even though you do not ascribe to their way of life, if you live or travel in their communities, you are compelled to abide by their guidelines on living. She also mentioned Disneyland, a 43-square mile theme park with its own water, power and transportation system.
One of the wicked federal laws that confirms our need for our own system, she noted, is the No Child Left Behind Act, specifically a last-minute revision that slipped under the radar: a certificate of completion that is offered in lieu of a high school diploma, and what some of our leaders say is creating “The Paper Plantation.”
Failing students are faced with the option of dropping out and enrolling into a G.E.D. program or staying in school and receiving a certificate of completion. While many choose the seemingly better solution of the certificate, Min. Ava listed numerous things that that student can never do in the future such as join the armed services, go to college, trade school, journeyman school, beauty school or culinary art school, or get a federal loan for a home or any other reason in their lifetime.
“With any thought of independence, that is why the first thing you take control of is the education of your children,” she added, repeating the need for “a model to replace the rhetoric.”
Returning to the female, she reminded the audience that Minister Farrakhan called the woman the co-creator with God. “God will always come to us on the level of consciousness that we have achieved. To my sisters, as co-creators with God, we must achieve the highest level possible. The only one greater than us is God Himself. Many of us have studied the Teachings for decades, but we are not manifesting the progress in life that reflects study of such perfected Word. We get stuck in a metaphysical comfort zone where we just enjoy talking about the truth,” she chided. “The fatal mistake in the past by many that followed the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the belief that we have grown beyond the fundamental ideas that carried me to this point. But remember we never grow beyond basic divine law.”
Min. Ava then concluded by recommending the review of Minister Farrakhan’s distinction between horizontal growth and vertical growth. “We can only advance vertically by embracing the self-accusing spirit that is the essence of God in all of us. If you look at the cross in the Christian church, most of the bar is below the horizontal bar. That is because most of life is a struggle and we have to be involved in the process of prayer, meditation, study, research, reflection assimilation and action–all leading to the ascension into the highest level of self,” she explained, “and that is to take us above the horizontal bar into the heavens, where we look up and see the star and crescent. When you reach that level, you and I will know our personal mission and our divine purpose in life.”
